When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  “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 o’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 forty-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 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 of Edinburgh, with a view of Blackford Hill, quite a distance in every way from the third-floor shoe box 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 of schoolwork done as well. She wasn’t at school anymore, 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 cafés, but that was okay because a person didn’t have to listen to someone saying, “Regina rhymes with vagina,” to them in an Internet café, 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 being 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 cafés 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 even 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 onto 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 Twelfth Night too. Reggie and Viola, 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 number 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 bookcases. 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 errands 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 way that an excitable and nearsighted chimpanzee might have done, accelerating when she should be braking, braking when she should be accelerating, going slow in the fast lane, fast in the slow lane, like someone on an amusement-arcade simulator rather than a real road.

  Reggie didn’t go to the horrible posh school anymore, 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, et cetera), boys who, although destined to follow the genetic code spiraled 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 wa
s different.

  You could have bought two really good cars a year for the price of the fees. Her scholarship covered only 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 had been 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 Gulf War, 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 B and Bs, and Reggie worked in Mr. Hussain’s shop on Sunday mornings. Even before she left school Reggie had always worked, paper routes and Saturday jobs and the like. She squirreled away money in her savings account, 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 moving line of goose-pimpled carcasses as they were dipped in scalding 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-Who-Came-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 good-bye 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 anymore either, because she had a tumor 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 tumor 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 with 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 if it were 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 were 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 okay. 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.”

  If the 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 center, 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 or a comb, an object that she touched every day, that was part of her life. 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.”
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  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 things 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 of ornaments that had been Christmas or wedding presents. “Quelle horreur!” Dr. Hunter laughed when she occasionally poked her head in there. “Some of this stuff is truly hideous,” she said to Reggie. Whether they were hideous or not, she couldn’t throw them away because they were gifts, and “gifts had to be honored.”

  “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.”

  Not honored forever, Reggie noticed, because every time a plastic charity bag slipped through the letter box, 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 things — rugs and lamps and ornaments. A different class of ornament from Mum’s collections of thimbles and miniature teapots that, despite their 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 colored glass panels, starbursts of red, snowflakes of blue, and rosettes of yellow, that cast prisms of color when the sun shone through. There were 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.