Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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*

'There's ice-cream in the freezer,' Patrick said. 'Cherry Garcia,' he said to Bridget. 'Is that OK with you?' 'What does that mean?' she said querulously. 'I've never understood.'

'The Grateful Dead,' Patrick said. 'Never your kind of music, Bridie. As I seem to remember, you were more ofa Partridge Family fan.'

'And you weren't?' Louise said to him. 'You don't seem like you were ever a Deadhead to me.'

'Sometimes I wonder who you think you married,' he said. What did that mean? He stood up and began to clear the plates. The food, cold and congealed, looked disgusting now.

'I'll get the ice-cream,' Louise said,jumping up so quickly that she nearly knocked Tim's glass over. She managed to catch it just in time.

'Good save,' he murmured. He was so English. A different class of person from Louise. Louise had a knee-jerk reaction to the accent ofa dominant culture. It was funny how sometimes you could realize you were all alone in a roomful of people. Well, four people, one of whom was you. Stranger in a strange land, a Ruth amongst an alien middle-class corn.

Instead ofgoing straight to the kitchen, she ran up the stairs to her bedroom (their bedroom) and took her rings out of the safe. The safe had been a proviso of the insurance company because of the value of the diamond. When she changed her insurance, the new insurance company insisted that Louise install a monitored security system and a safe, 'For the ring, Mrs Brennan,' the girl on the other end of the phone said. Louise had never been called 'Mrs' in her life and couldn't believe the amount of bile that shot into her system at the word, and not just at that word, but to add insult to injury the girl had called her by Patrick's surname as if she was a chattel. She was baffied by women who changed their names when they got married, your name was the closest thing to your self. Sometimes your name was all you had. Joanna Hunter changed her name when she married, but then you would, wouldn't you? But at least she could cling to the epithet of'Doctor' to give her an identity. If Louise was in Joanna Hunter's shoes she would have changed her name long before marriage. She wouldn't have wanted to be known for ever as that little girl lost in the bloody field ofwheat. Louise might not have had an idyllic childhood but it had been a whole lot better than Joanna Hunter's.

'That would be Detective ChiefInspector Monroe,' she said coldly to the girl from the insurance company. 'Not Mrs Brennan.'

Louise only found out afterwards that Patrick had bought the diamond ring with some of the money invested from Samantha's life insurance. Truly a blood diamond, after all.

She didn't often wear the big diamond, just occasionally if they were going out somewhere. He made her go out places, theatre, restaurants, opera, concerts, dinner parties -even, God help her, to charity fund-raisers where the rich and richer hobnobbed at two thousand a table. Kilts and ceilidhs, Louise's idea ofhell. Still, it made her realize how narrow she had let her life become, it had just been Archie, work, her cat, although not necessarily in that order. And now her cat was dead and Archie had spread his wings. 'Live your life, Louise,' Patrick said, 'don't endure it.'

She didn't wear her wedding ring either. Patrick wore his. He never mentioned her unworn wedding ring or the diamond in the safe. Lying in bed at night Louise could see the rings glinting in the dark, even when the safe was shut. Band of gold. Band around the heart. Heart of darkness. Darkness evermore.

There had been another man once. The kind of man she could have imagined standing shoulder to shoulder with, a comrade-inarms, but they had been as chaste as protagonists in an Austen novel. All sense and no sensibility, no persuasion at all. She had kept vaguely in touch with Jackson but it had been going nowhere because it had nowhere to go. He'd had a pregnant girlfriend and neither of them had talked about the consequences of that in their occasional drunken, late-night texts. Then the pregnant girlfriend dumped him and told him it wasn't his baby and they hadn't talked about the consequences of that either. Perhaps it had only been Louise who had been drunk. She wasn't a drinker, not really (,Only days with a "y" in them'), she would never go down the same path as her mother, but sometimes, before she met Patrick, she had found herself looking forward to pouring the first drink of the evening in a way that went beyond pleasant anticipation. Now her drinking followed Patrick's civilized regime, a glass or two of a good red with a meal. Just as well, she made a maudlin drunk.

Patrick believed in the health-giving properties of red wine. He had embraced the Red Wine Diet, buying cases of some French wine that was going to make him live for ever. He went for a swim five mornings a week, played golf twice a week, had a positive attitude every day of the week. It was like living with an alien pretending to be human.

He was solicitous about her health too (,Ever thought of doing yoga? Tai-chi? Something meditative?'). He didn't want to be widowed a second time. A surgeon seeing off two wives in a row, it wouldn't look good.

She slipped the ring on her finger. Let Bridget see that her price nlight not be above rubies but she was worth a three-and-a-halfcarat piece of ice. She added her wedding ring and her finger felt suddenly weighed down. The rings were tight. For a second she thought they had shrunk, until she realized that it was more likely that her finger had grown bigger.

Catching sight of herself in the nlirror she felt shocked -her skin was alabaster and her eyes were huge and black, as if she'd been taking belladonna. At her temple a large vein throbbed like a worm buried beneath her skin. She looked like someone who had been in a terrible accident.

She had heard the phone ringing insistently downstairs and by the time she came reluctantly down Patrick was in the hallway, pulling on his Berghaus and making eagerly for the door. 'There's been a train crash,' he said to her. 'A bad one. All hands on deck tonight,' he added cheerfully. 'Conung?'

Funny Old World REGGIE CHASE, AS SMALL AS A MOUSE, AS QUIET AS A HOUSE WITH NO one home. She was absent-mindedly scratching the top of Banjo's head. Homer was open on her lap but she was watching Coronation Street. She had almost finished an old box of violet creams that she'd rummaged out of the back of one of Ms MacDonald's kitchen cupboards (any port in a storm). She checked the clock, Ms MacDonald would be home soon.

She could hear a train approaching, the noise muted at first by the wind and then growing louder and louder. Not the usual train noise, but a great rumbling wave ofsound that seemed to be rolling towards the house. Reggie leaped instinctively to her feet, she had the feeling that the train was actually going to come through the house. Then another higher-pitched sound as if a giant hand was clawing a giant blackboard with giant fingernails and finally a tremendous bang like an explosive clap of thunder. The apocalypse had come to town.

And then ... nothing. The gas fire hissed, Banjo snored and grunted, the rain continued to throw itself against the living-room window. The Coronation Street theme music started up for the credits. Reggie, book in hand, a half-eaten violet cream in her mouth was still standing in the middle of the floor, poised for flight. ~or a moment it was as if nothing had happened.

Then she heard voices and doors banging as people from the neighbouring houses ran into the street. R. Eggie open. Ed ,the fr~n,t door and stuck her head out into the wmd and ram. A tram s crashed' a man said to her. 'Right out back.' Reggie picked up the phone {n the hall and dialled 999. Dr Hunter had told her that in an emergency everyone presumed that someone else would call. Reggie wasn't going to be that person who presumed. .

'Back soon,' she said to Banjo, pulling on her jacket. She pIcked up the big torch that Ms MacDonald kept by the fuse box at the fr~nt door, put the house keys in her pocket, pulled the door shut behm~ her and ran out into the rain. The world wasn't going to end thIS night. Not if Reggie had anything to do with it.

What larks, Reggie!

The Celestial City THE TUNNEL WAS WHITE, NOT BLACK. NOT SO MUCH A TUNNEL AS A corridor. It was very brightly lit. And there were seats, white moulded plastic benches that seemed to be part of the wall. He was sitting on one as if he was waiting for something. It reminded him of a scene from a science-fiction film. Jackson expected that any minute his sister or his brother would appear and invite him to follow them into the light. He knew it was altered temporal lobe function or oxygen deprivation to his brain as his body shut down. Or even an excess of ketamine -he'd read somewhere about that, National Geographic probably. Still, it was a surprise when it happened to you. You would think it would feel like a cliche or a dream but it didn't. He was at ease, in a way that he didn't ever remember feeling when he was alive. It no longer mattered that he wasn't in control. He wondered what was going to happen next.

On cue, his sister suddenly appeared sitting next to him on the bench. She touched the back of his hand and smiled at him. Neither of them spoke, there was nothing to say and everything to say at the same time. Words would never have been able to convey what he was feeling, even if he had been able to speak, which he wasn't.

He was experiencing euphoria. It had never happened to him before, even at the happiest times in his life -when he was in love, when Marlee was born -any possibility of clear, uncut joy had been fogged by the anxiety. He had never floated free of the world's cares before. He hoped it was going to go on for ever.

His sister moved her face close to his and he thought she was going to kiss him on the lips but instead she breathed into his mouth. His sister's signature scent was violets -she wore April Violet cologne and her favourite chocolates were violet creams, even the sight of which made Jackson feel sick when he was a boy -so he wasn't surprised that her breath tasted ofviolets. He felt as ifhe had inhaled the Holy Ghost. But then he felt himself being pulled out of the tunnel, away from Niamh, and he had to fight to resist. She stood up and started to walk away. He exhaled the Holy Ghost and shut his mouth so it couldn't get back in. He stood up and followed his sister.

Some slippage, some interruption m the space-time continuum. Something had punched him in the chest, incredibly hard. He wasn't in the white corridor. He was in the Land of Pain. And then, just as suddenly, he was back in the white corridor, his sister walking ahead, looking over her shoulder, beckoning to him. He wanted to tell her that it was OK, he was coming, but he still couldn't speak. More than anything in the world he wanted to follow his sister. Wherever it was, it was going to be the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Something jack-hammered him in the chest again. He felt suddenly furious. Who was doing this, who was trying to stop him from going with his sister?

He was back in the white corridor again, but he couldn't see Niamh anywhere. Had she got tired ofwaiting for him? Then that was it, the white corridor disappeared for good, replaced by something strange and fuzzy, like bad reception on a black-and-white television set. And more blinding pain, like lightning bolts being thrown around in his skull.

There was a word for how he felt but it took him a long time to find it in his fried-up brain. 'Heartbroken', that was the word. He had been on a journey to somewhere wonderful and some bugger ~ad come along and stopped him. Then he started to fade, slipping mto the darkness again, into oblivion. No white corridor this time just endless night. '

Chapter III

Tomorrow.

The Dogs They Lift Behind.

WHAT DID HE MEAN SHE'D GONE AWAY? GONE AWAY? GONE AWAY where? And why? To see an elderly aunt who's been taken ill, he said. She'd never mentioned having an aunt, let alone one who might get ill.

'She's only just been taken ill,' Mr Hunter said impatiently, as if Reggie was a nuisance, as if it was her that had phoned him at half past six in the morning, waking in a fumbling daze of sleep, unable to understand why Mr Hunter was on the other end of the phone saying, 'You don't need to come in today.' For a moment Reggie thought it must be something to do with the train crash, and then worse -that something had happened to Dr Hunter or the baby -or worst of all, that Dr Hunter and the baby had been involved in the train crash in some way. But no, he had phoned at an unearthly hour to tell her about a sick aunt.

'What aunt?' Reggie puzzled. 'She's never mentioned an aunt.'

'Well, I don't expect Jo tells you everything,' Mr Hunter said.

'So everything's definitely OK with Dr Hunter and the baby?' Reggie said. 'They're not ill or anything?'

'Of course not,' Mr Hunter said. 'Why should they be?'

'When did Dr Hunter leave?'

'She drove down last night.'

'Down?'

'To Yorkshire.'

'Where inYorkshire?'

'Hawes, since you must know every detail.'

'Whores?'

'H-a-w-e-s. Can we stop this catechism now? Tell you what, take a wee holiday, Reggie. Jo will be back in a few days. She'll phone you then.' Why hadn't Dr Hunter phoned her, that was the question. Dr Hunter always had her mobile with her, she called it her 'lifeline'. She used it for everything -the house phone 'belonged to Neil', she always said. But then perhaps she had been driving, in too much of a hurry to get to this mysterious aunt to stop and call Reggie. But Dr Hunter wasn't the kind ofperson not to call you. It made Reggie feel dismissed, a bit like a servant. When had she left? 'Last night,' Mr Hunter said.

It would have been darkest dark when she drove away. Reggie imagined Dr Hunter ploughing through the night, through the rain, the baby asleep in the car-seat in the back, or awake and noisily distracting Dr Hunter from the road ahead while she scrabbled in the baby-bag for a mini-oatcake to keep him quiet while the Tweenies' Greatest Hits (the baby's favourite) added further to the potential accident scenario. It was funny that Dr Hunter had driven down to Yorkshire while at the same time the train hurtled away from it into disaster, into Reggie's life.

Reggie had an aunt in Australia -her mother's sister, Linda. 'Never close, Linda and me,' Reggie's mother used to say. When Mum died, Reggie had to endure an awkward phone call with Linda. 'Never close, your mum and me,' Linda echoed. 'But I'm sorry for your loss,' as if it wasn't her loss at all, but Reggie's alone to bear. Before the phone call Reggie had wondered ifLinda would invite her to come over to Australia to live or at least to stay for a holiday (Oh, you poor thing, come here and let me look after you), but clearly this thought had never even entered Linda's mind (,Well, take care of yourself then, Regina.'). The day suddenly stretched emptily ahead. 'It'll be nice for you to have some time off,' Mr Hunter said but it wasn't nice at all, Reggie didn't want time off. She wanted to see Dr Hunter and the baby, she wanted to tell Dr Hunter about what had happened last night -the train crash, Ms MacDonald, the man. Especially the man because, if you thought about it, the fact that the man was alive (if he was still alive) was all down not to Reggie but to Dr Hunter.

All night -or what little was left ofit by the time she got to bed -Reggie had tossed restlessly in the unfamiliar surroundings of Ms MacDonald's back bedroom, going over the events of the last hours and bursting with excitement at the idea of retelling them to Dr Hunter. Well, perhaps excitement was the wrong word, terrible things had happened on that railway track, but Reggie had been involved in them, a witness and a participant. People she knew had died. People she didn't know had died. Drama -that was a better word. And she needed to tell someone about the drama. More specifically she needed to tell Dr Hunter about it because Dr Hunter was the only person she knew who was interested in her life now that Mum had gone.

Dr Hunter would have led her into the kitchen where she would have switched on the coffee machine and made Reggie sit down at the nice big wooden table and when, but only when (Strict house rules, Reggie), they had mugs ofcoffee and a plate ofchocolate biscuits in front of them, Dr Hunter, face bright with anticipation, would have said, 'Right, Reggie, come on then, tell me all about it,' and Reggie would have taken a deep breath and said, 'You know the train crash last night? I was there.'

And now because of some aunt, an aunt who lived in H-a-w-e-s, Reggie had no one to tell. Although, of course, Dr Hunter would have been at work by the time Reggie arrived and there would only have been Mr Hunter (What's your story, Reggie?) who was an unsatisfactory audience at the best of times.

Reggie went downstairs to Ms MacDonald's kitchen, flicked on the kettle and spooned instant coffee into an 'I Believe in Angels' mug. While she waited for the kettle to boil she bundled her disgusting clothes from last night into the washing machine, after which she found half a stale sliced white loaf in the breadbin, made a Jenga tower of toast and jam from it and turned on the television in time to catch the seven o'clock headlines on GMTV.

'Fifteen people dead, four critical, many severely injured,' the newsreader said with her best serious face on. She handed over to a reporter who was 'live at the scene'. The man, who was in a trench coat and was clutching a microphone, was trying to look as ifhe wasn't freezing cold, as if he hadn't raced through the night like a ghoul to get to Scotland, high on adrenalin at the idea of a disaster. 'As dawn begins to break here you can see that behind me there is a scene ofutter devastation,' he intoned solemnly. Across the bottom of the screen it said'Musselburgh Train Crash'.

In the arc-lit background, people in fluorescent yellow jackets moved around the wreckage. 'The first of the heavy lifting gear is beginning to arrive,' the reporter said, 'as the investigation into the causes of this tragic accident begins.' The noises of engines revving and machinery clanking were the same sounds that Reggie could hear from Ms MacDonald's living room. If she had stood on tiptoe at the bedroom window she could probably have seen the reporter.

After Mum died a journalist had come round to the flat. She had been a lot more dowdy and a lot less perky than any of the reporters that you saw on TV. She had brought a photographer with her, 'Dave,' the woman said, indicating a man lurking in the stairwell as if waiting for a cue to come up on stage. He gave Reggie a sheepish little wave as if even he, battle-hardened veteran of a hundred local tragedies of one kind or another, could understand why a girl who had just lost her mother might not want to be photographed at eight in the morning with her eyes red-raw from weeping. 'Fuck off,' Reggie said and shut the front door in the reporter's face. Mum would have been horrified at her language. She was pretty horrified herself.

The reporter wrote the piece anyway. 'Local woman in holiday swimming-pool tragedy. Daughter too upset to comment'.

Banjo, lying on the sofa next to her like a deflated cushion, whimpered in his sleep, his paws moving as if he was chasing dream rabbits. He hadn't wanted to wake up last night, hadn't shown any interest in anything, so Reggie had put him on the sofa, covered him up with a blanket and -because she could hardly leave him all alone -had herself slept in Ms MacDonald's inhospitable guest room between brushed nylon sheets, beneath a thin, slightly damp eiderdown.

At home, Reggie now slept in Mum's double bed, pillowed and downy, made up with the pink broderie-anglaise sheets Mum had liked best and exorcized of all trace of Gary's sweaty, hairy biker's body. Before Spain, Reggie had lain in bed on the other side of the wall, three pillows over her head, trying not to hear the (barely) muffled laughs and creaks coming from Mum's room. It had been incredibly embarrassing. No mother should subject her teenage daughter to that.

It was nice when she was lying in Mum's bed in the dark to have the comfort of a streetlamp outside, like a big orange nightlight. It was only the bed that Reggie had taken over the occupation of, on account of her own bedroom being a windowless boxroom. The rest of the room was still Mum's, her clothes in the wardrobe, her cosmetics on the dressing table, her slippers beneath the bed, waiting patiently for her feet. Miracle by Danielle Steel was still on the bedside table, the corner of turned down where Mum had left off to go to Spain. Reggie couldn't move it from its final resting place. Mum hadn't taken any books with her on holiday. 'I don't suppose I'll have time for reading,' she giggled.

Mary, Trish and Jean had given up trying to persuade Reggie to give Mum's stuff to charity -they had offered to box everything up and 'get rid of it' -but Reggie went into charity shops herself and imagined herself raking through the second-hand paperbacks and bits of old-lady china and finding one of Mum's skirts or a pair of her shoes. Even worse -a complete stranger pawing Mum's stuff. We go and leave nothing behind, Dr Hunter said but that wasn't true, Mum had left a lot.

Banjo suddenly made an odd grunting noise that Reggie had never heard before. The phone number for the vet, written in black felt tip, was taped to the wall beside the phone. Reggie hoped she wouldn't be the one who would have to call it. She stroked the dog's head absent-mindedly while she finished her toast. She was still ravenous as ifshe'd skipped several meals. It felt like a whole lifetime since she had sat at the dining table with Ms MacDonald, eating her 'speciality' spaghetti. Reggie's stomach did a funny flip at the thought of Ms MacDonald. She was never going to sit at that table again, never eat spaghetti, never eat anything at all. She had had her last supper.

The man live at the scene was still speaking. 'Reports vary as to what actually happened here last night and the police have so far neither confirmed nor denied that at the time of the accident there was a vehicle on the track a few hundred yards from here.' A picture flashed on the screen of a bridge over the railway line. A car had obviously driven off the road and knocked down the wall of the bridge and fallen on to the track below.

The reporter didn't add that the vehicle was a blue Citroen Saxo or that it contained Ms MacDonald, very dead at the scene. These facts hadn't been made public yet, only Reggie knew because the police had come to Ms MacDonald's house last night, after Reggie had got back from the train crash, and asked her lots of questions about 'the occupant of the house' -where was she and what time was Reggie expecting her back? There were two uniformed policemen, one florid and middle-aged (,Sergeant Bob Wiseman'), the other Asian, small and handsome and young and apparently nameless.

For some reason they had their wires crossed and thought Reggie was Ms MacDonald's daughter. ('Has your mother left you alone in the house?') The handsome young Asian PC made her a cup of tea and handed it to her nervously as if he wasn't sure what she would do with it. She was starving then as well and had thought about the Tunnock's Caramel Wafer that she should have been eating with Ms MacDonald at that moment. She supposed it wasn't appropriate to suggest biscuits when the older policeman had just said to her, 'I'm really sorry but I'm afraid we think your mother may be dead.'

For a moment Reggie was confused, Mum had been dead for over a year so it seemed a little late to be telling her about it now. Her brain was fudge. She had come in from the train crash, soaked to the skin and covered in mud and filth and blood. The man's blood. She had stripped off and endured an eternity beneath Ms MacDonald's lukewarm shower before putting on her lavender fleece dressing gown which smelt slightly unpleasant and had stains where Ms MacDonald's night-time Horlicks had dribbled down the front. There had still been sirens wailing outside and the sound of helicopters put-puttering in the sky.

They had taken the man away in a helicopter. Reggie had watched it lift offfrom a field on the other side of the track. 'You did well,' the paramedic said to her. 'You gave him a chance.'

'She's not my mother,' Reggie said to the older policeman.

'Where is your mother, hen?' he asked, looking concerned.

'I'm sixteen,' Reggie said. 'I'm not a child, I just look young for my age. I can't help it.' Both policemen studied her doubtfully, even the handsome Asian one who looked like a sixth-former. 'I can show you my ID, if you want. And my mother's dead already,' Reggie said. 'Everybody's dead.'

'Not everybody,' the Asian guy said, as if he was correcting misinformation rather than being kind. Reggie frowned at him. She wished she wasn't wearing Ms MacDonald's grotty dressing gown. She didn't want him to think she dressed like that out of choice.

'We're not releasing these details to the press yet,' the middle-aged policeman said. He looked familiar, Reggie had a feeling he had once come to the flat looking for Billy.

'Right,' Reggie said, trying to concentrate on what he was saying. She was so tired, down to the bone.

'We're not quite sure what happened,' he said. 'We think Mrs MacDonald must have driven off the road and fallen down on to the track somehow. You don't know if she had been feeling at all depressed lately?'

'Mzzz MacDonald,' Reggie corrected him on Ms MacDonald's behalf. 'You think she killed herself?' Reggie was prepared to give this idea consideration -Ms MacDonald was dying after all and might have decided to go quickly rather than slowly -until she remembered Banjo. She would never leave the dog on his own. IfMs MacDonald were going to commit suicide by driving off a bridge and landing in front of an express train she would have taken Banjo with her, sitting up in the front of the Saxo like a mascot.

'Nah,' Reggie said, 'Ms MacDonald was just a rubbish driver.' She didn't add that Ms MacDonald was Rapture Ready, that she embraced the end of all things and was expecting to live eternally in a place that when she described it sounded a bit like Scarborough.

Reggie imagined Ms MacDonald nodding serenely at the 125 express train that was charging towards her, saying, 'That'll be God's will then.' Or was she astonished, did she consult her watch to check if the train was on time, did she say, 'Not already, surely?' One second there, the next gone. It was a funny old world.

Ofcourse, alternatively, she might have been out of her mind with panic when she realized she was stuck with the instrument of her death bearing down on her at over a hundred miles an hour, too confused in the moment to do anything as sensible as get out of the car and run for her life. But Reggie would rather not think about that scenario.

'Plus she had a brain tumour,' she added, trying not to catch the eye of the Asian policeman in case she embarrassed herself by blushing. 'I mean it might just have, I dunno, exploded.'

'We need someone to identity her,' Sergeant Wiseman said. 'Do you think you can do it?'

'Now?'

'Tomorrow will do.'

And now it was tomorrow.

'We will bring you more news as we have it,' the newsreader said, staring seriously at the camera. The programme cut to his copresenter, whose smile was only slightly tempered by the proximity of disaster. 'Now,' she said, 'we're delighted to welcome to the studio the newest resident of Albert Square, already making waves in EastEnders with her-' Reggie switched the television off.

She noticed how still the air in the house was, as if someone had breathed out and not breathed in again. Reggie looked closely at Banjo. His eyes were rheumy slits and his tongue was lolling out of the side ofhis mouth. No movement in his ancient little lungs. Dead. Here one second, gone the next. The breath was the thing. It was everything. Breathing was the difference between alive and dead. She had breathed life into a man, should she try and do the same with a dog? But no, really, if he had been a person he would have had 'Do Not Resuscitate' written on a piece of paper inside the tiny barrel that hung from his collar. Some people left early (a lot of people closely related to Reggie), but some people (and dogs) went when they were supposed to.

A great bubble of something like laughter but that she knew was grief rose up in Reggie's chest. She'd had the same reaction when she was told about Mum's death -in a phone call from Sue (minus Carl) from Warrington because Gary was 'too choked' to talk. 'Sorry, love,' Sue said, in a voice husky from fags. She sounded like she meant it, sounded like she cared more about Mum after a couple of days' acquaintance than her sister Linda did after a whole childhood together.

Reggie wished she had a sister, someone else who had known and loved Mum so that she wasn't all alone keeping her memory alive. There were Mary, Trish and Jean, but in the last year they had moved on, making Mum into a sad memory, no longer a real person. Billy was no good, Billy only cared about Billy. When Reggie died that would be the end of Mum. And when Reggie died that would be the end of Reggie, of course. Reggie wanted a dozen kids so that when she was gone they could all get together and talk about her (Do you remember when . .. ?) and not one of them would feel they'd been left alone in the world.

Reggie had asked Dr Hunter if she wanted more children, a brother or a sister for the baby, and she made a funny face and said, 'Another baby?' as if that was an outlandish idea. And Reggie could see her point. This baby was everything, he was emperor of the world, he was the world.

Reggie visited Mum's grave every week and talked to her and then on the way home from this pilgrimage she stopped in at the Catholic church and lit a candle for her. Reggie didn't believe in any ofthat hocus-pocus, but she believed in keeping the dead alive. There would be more candles to light now.