When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  She stumbled down the tenement stairs, drenched in cold sweat and her heart hammering. She barged back into Mr. Hussain’s shop. “All right?” Mr. Hussain asked, and she mumbled, “No, half left,” which was a poor joke of Billy’s when he was small. He wasn’t funny, even then. Should she tell Mr. Hussain? What would happen? He would make her a cup of sugary tea in the back of the shop and then he would phone the police and then the men would come back and shoot her with an imaginary gun? Kill her with words? They looked exactly like the types who had real guns. They looked exactly like Billy.

  “Got to dash, Mr. H. I’m gonna miss my bus.”

  If only she had Sadie with her, Reggie thought as she walked as fast as she could to the bus stop. People thought twice about messing with you if you had a big dog by your side. “It’s like the parting of the Red Sea when you’re out with Sadie,” Dr. Hunter said once, fondling the big dog’s ears. “I always feel safe with her.” Did Dr. Hunter need to feel safe? Why? Something to do with her history?

  Had they really been looking for her? Made a mistake about her gender (“a guy called Reggie”)? Why? She had done nothing apart from being Billy’s sister. Maybe that was enough. She tried phoning her brother and got a “the person you are trying to reach is not available” message. She dialed Dr. Hunter’s number, but it rang and rang without answer. (“Your dead.”) Without the apostrophe it implied something else, the dead that belonged to Reggie. There were enough of them.

  The thing was, when Mr. Hunter was speaking to her on the phone, Reggie had heard Sadie bark in the background. When she wasn’t at work, Dr. Hunter took Sadie with her everywhere, so why would she leave her behind?

  “Her aunt’s allergic.”

  “Aunt Agnes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t Dr. Hunter give her something for it? Antihistamine or something? Why isn’t she answering her phone, Mr. Hunter?”

  “Leave Jo alone, Reggie. This is a bad time for her. It’s enough the past coming back to haunt her without you hounding her. Okay?”

  “But —”

  “You know what, Reggie?” Mr. Hunter said.

  “What?”

  “Just leave it. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now.”

  “Me too, Mr. H. Me too.”

  Missing in Action

  A long time ago, a long, long time ago, when the world was much younger and so was Jackson, he had his blood group tattooed on his chest, just above his heart. A soldier’s trick so that when you are shot or blown up, the medics can treat you as quickly as possible. Other guys he was in the army with had extended their skin-ink collections, adding on women and bulldogs and Union Jacks and, yes, indeed, the word Mother, but Jackson had never been a fan of the tattooist’s art, had even promised his daughter a thousand pounds in cash if she made it to twenty-one without feeling the need to decorate her skin with a butterfly or a dolphin or the Chinese character for happiness. Jackson himself had stuck with the one practical, lowercase message — “blood type A positive,” until now no more than a faded-blue souvenir of another life. “A positive”— a nice common kind of blood shared by roughly 35 percent of the population. Plenty of donors. And he’d needed them apparently, every precious ounce of red blood having been replaced courtesy of a band of blood brothers and sisters who had stopped him from being erased from his own life.

  “We thought we’d got the artery, but you just kept pumping it out. It took a couple of goes,” a cheerful doctor told him. “Dr. Bruce, call me Mike,” he said, sitting on the end of Jackson’s bed and grinning at him as if they’d just met in a bar. Call-Me-Mike was too young to be a doctor. Jackson wondered if the nurses knew that a boy from the local primary school was loose on the wards.

  “Just humor him,” the fuzzy — now less fuzzy — nurse murmured in Jackson’s ear. “He thinks he’s a grown-up.”

  “Thank you,” Jackson said to him.

  “No worries, mate.”

  An Australian schoolboy.

  The junior registrar, “Dr. Samms, call me Charlie,” looked like Harry Potter. Jackson didn’t really want to be treated by a doctor who looked like Harry Potter, but he wasn’t in a position to argue. “You seem to have taken a bit of a dunt to the head,” Wizard Boy said. “Ever had one before?”

  “Maybe,” Jackson said.

  “Not a good idea,” Wizard Boy said as if being banged on the head were something you volunteered for.

  “Fuzzy,” Jackson said. It was definitely his favorite word. When his daughter was first learning to talk, her first word was cat. She used it for everything — ducks, milk, buggy — anything of interest in her life, everything was cat. A one-word world. It made life much simpler, he must phone her and tell her. As soon as he could remember her name. Or, come to that, his own name.

  He slept, and when he woke again, there was another nurse by the side of the bed.

  “Who am I?” he asked. He sounded like an amateur philosopher, but it wasn’t a metaphysical question. Really, who was he?

  “Your name’s Andrew Decker,” she said.

  “Really?” Jackson said. The name rang a tiny, tiny bell somewhere in the dark pit of his abandoned memories, yet he didn’t have any relationship with it at all. He didn’t feel like an Andrew Decker, but then, he didn’t really feel like anyone. “How do you know?”

  “Your wallet was in your jacket pocket,” the nurse said. “It had a driving license with your name and address on it. The police are trying to contact someone at the address.”

  His ulnar artery had been partially severed, leading to “profuse and rapid bleeding,” the Potter look-alike said. His blood pressure had dropped and he had gone into shock. His brain had been starved of blood. “Fatigue, shortness of breath, chills?” Australian Mike, the flying doctor, said. He looked as if he took more drugs than his patients. “Nausea, confusion, disorientation, hallucinations? Yeah?”

  “I was in a white corridor.”

  “Bit of a cliché,” Wizard Boy said.

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Jackson said.

  “You might never remember the accident,” the flying doctor said. “It was probably never transferred into your long-term memory. But you’ll remember just about everything else. After all, you already know you have a daughter.”

  Someone had given him first aid, had saved his life at the scene. One more person he would never be able to thank.

  A policewoman came and sat by the side of his bed and waited patiently for him to focus on her. Someone had visited the address on his driving license and the people who lived there had never heard of an “Andrew Decker.” It was an old driving license, not a photo card, perhaps he had failed to renew it when he changed his address?

  Jackson looked at her blankly. “No idea.”

  “Well, early days,” she said cheerfully. “Someone’s bound to come forward and claim you.”

  It was strange to be surrounded by the aftermath of a disaster that you had no memory of. He could remember nothing about the train crash, could remember nothing about anything. He was a blank sheet of paper, a clock without hands. Now he wished that he hadn’t been so sparse with the information that he’d been branded with. Alongside his blood group he should have added his name, rank, and serial number.

  “I had my cat chipped,” a nurse said to him. “It gives me peace of mind.”

  I died,” he said to a new doctor.

  “Briefly,” she said dismissively, as if you had to be dead a lot longer to impress her. Dr. Foster, a woman, who didn’t seem to want to be on first-name terms.

  “But technically . . . ,” he said, too weak to pursue the argument.

  She sighed as if patients were always bickering about their dead or alive status. “Yes. Technically dead,” she conceded. “Very briefly.”

  He’d already been here in another lifetime. How many weeks? “Eighteen hours, actually,” the new doctor said. He’d been to hell and back (or possibly heaven and back), and it had taken less tha
n a day. Quite impressive. When would they let him go home?

  “How about when you know where you live?” Dr. Foster offered.

  “Fair enough,” Jackson said.

  He slept. That’s what he did. He was the sleeper. He slept for years. When he woke up, they told him about the train crash again. A nurse showed him the front page of a newspaper. “CARNAGE!” it said. He couldn’t remember what the word meant. Nothing to do with cars, he supposed. He liked cars. He was a man called Andrew Decker who liked cars but who had been traveling on a train, destination unknown. No ticket, no phone, no signs of a life. No one who had noticed that he’d gone and not come back.

  Now how long had he been here?

  “Twenty hours,” Dr. Foster said.

  Reggie Chase, Girl Detective

  I thought I could take the dog for a walk.”

  “The dog?”

  “Sadie.”

  Mr. Hunter sounded hoarse. He hadn’t shaved and looked tired. (“He’s like a bear in the morning.”) He smelled of the cigarettes that he was supposed to have given up “ages ago.” The kitchen was already a mess. It seemed he was going to keep her hovering on the doorstep rather than invite her in. Reggie caught sight of a half-empty bottle of whisky on the counter. “Bachelor’s rules apply,” he said. He gave a little laugh, “When the cat’s away, the dog will play.” Two empty mugs sat on the big kitchen table, one of them had a smear of lipstick on the rim, pale coral, not Dr. Hunter’s color. Did that come under Mr. Hunter’s bachelor’s rules too?

  “Seeing as Dr. Hunter usually takes Sadie for her walk,” Reggie said, “I thought I could do it for you while she’s visiting her aunt. Aunt Agnes.”

  Mr. Hunter rubbed the stubble on his face as if he were having trouble remembering who Reggie was. Sadie had no such problem, appearing at Mr. Hunter’s side, wagging her tail at the sight of Reggie, although in a more subdued way than usual.

  “Have you spoken to Dr. Hunter since she left last night?”

  “Yes, of course I have.”

  “How did you speak to her?”

  “How?” Mr. Hunter frowned. “On the phone, of course.”

  “Her phone?”

  “Yes. Her phone.”

  “Only I’ve been phoning Dr. Hunter, on her phone, and get no answer.”

  “I expect she’s very busy.”

  “With the aunt?”

  “Yes, the aunt.”

  “Aunt Agnes? In Hawes?”

  “Yes and yes. I have spoken to her, Reggie. She’s fine. She doesn’t want to be bothered.”

  “Bothered?”

  “What did you do to your head?” Mr. Hunter asked, changing the subject. “You look worse than I feel.” Reggie gingerly felt the bruise on her forehead where she had hit it in the shower.

  “Wasn’t looking where I was going,” she said.

  Sadie whined impatiently. She had heard the word walk several sentences ago and still nothing had happened.

  “You probably don’t have time to take Sadie out,” Reggie said. “You having a lot of things to do and everything.” Mr. Hunter looked down at the dog as if it were going to answer for him and then shrugged and said, “Aye, right, fine, okay, then.” Which seemed like a lot of words for yes, even for a Weegie.

  “Can I have a phone number for Dr. Hunter’s aunt?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Reggie asked.

  “Because her aunt needs peace and quiet.”

  “Can I leave my bag?”

  “Bag?” Mr. Hunter echoed as if he couldn’t see the enormous Topshop bag that Reggie had lugged all the way over there. She had taken the bus to the town center and bled her Topshop account. She had fled the flat in Gorgie with what she stood up in (Ms. MacDonald’s clothes, unfortunately), and she wasn’t going back for any of her stuff that was lying in a dodgy-smelling heap in her room. In fact, she wasn’t going back to that flat for anything. She just wished that her books and A-level course work had been left undefiled.

  In Topshop, Reggie had bought two pairs of jeans, two T-shirts, two sweaters, six pairs of underpants and socks, two bras, a pair of trainers, two pairs of pajamas, a coat, a scarf, a hat, and a pair of gloves. (“Never knowingly underdressed,” Dr. Hunter used to laugh when she saw Reggie piling on her layers of winter clothes to go home.) Reggie had never bought so many clothes at one time, apart from when she and Mum had tried to comply with the gargantuan school-uniform list at the horrible posh school. Being in Topshop had been like buying a layette or a trousseau, both pleasingly old-fashioned words for starting a new life. Not much chance of that.

  She put on a whole set of new clothes in the Topshop changing room and threw Ms. MacDonald’s clothes into a Dumpster on the street. It felt like a cruel act. Ms. MacDonald herself was lying quietly in cold storage, as unwanted as her clothes.

  Reggie had caught a bus from town to the hospital and presented herself at reception (she asked again about “Jackson Brodie,” but there was still no record of him), where a very nice Polish girl (“from Gdansk”) collected her and led her to a room so that she could look at Ms. MacDonald through glass. A room with a view. It was like looking at a tableau or being presented with a small, intimate piece of theater. Ms. MacDonald’s face was uncovered and Reggie said, “Yes, that’s her.” Her face was bruised and swollen but she didn’t look as bad as Reggie had expected. She didn’t like to think what condition the rest of her was in. It seemed unlikely that she was all in one piece.

  Reggie supposed that both her old teacher and her blue Saxo would be the subject of a lot of forensic tests. Last night, Sergeant Wiseman had made a note of Reggie’s mobile phone number and said that someone would contact her when “the body” was released. Reggie wanted to say that it was nothing to do with her, but it would have sounded churlish given the circumstances — carnage et cetera. And anyway, she was only sixteen. She might be technically an adult, but really she was just a child. You couldn’t make people who were almost children be responsible for dead bodies. Could you?

  This was the third dead body Reggie had seen in her life. Ms. MacDonald, Mum, and the soldier last night. Four if you counted Banjo. It seemed a lot for a person of so few years.

  She’d identified a dead body, had her flat vandalized, and been threatened by violent idiots, and it wasn’t even lunchtime. Reggie hoped the rest of the day would be more uneventful.

  No,” Mr. Hunter said.

  “No what?”

  “No, you can’t leave your bag, I have to go out.”

  “I have a key.”

  “Of course you do.” Mr. Hunter gave a long-suffering sigh as if he were conceding a drawn-out argument. “Okay. Give me the bag, I’ll get the dog-lead.” He took the Topshop bag from Reggie and dropped it unceremoniously on the floor by the sink and then unhooked the dog’s lead from behind the door and handed it over. An eager Sadie bounded past him as if set free from prison.

  “Oh, and Mr. H.,” Reggie said boldly (poking the bear), “it’s Thursday. Dr. Hunter pays me on a Thursday.”

  “Does she, now?” Mr. Hunter said. He smiled at her, one of his nice smiles that recognized you as a special person, and took his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans and pinched out a small sheaf of notes without counting them. “Don’t spend it all at once,” he laughed, as if he were handing over pocket money rather than payment for a job well done. “Leave some clothes in the shops, okay?”

  “Very funny, Mr. H. Thanks.” No point in telling him that she’d been on her shopping spree because two jokers had wrecked her house and her clothes. The Hunters didn’t live in that kind of world. Reggie didn’t want to live in that kind of world either.

  When Mr. Hunter had gone back in the house and shut the door, Reggie counted the money. It was half of what Dr. Hunter gave her.

  Sadie had a basket of toys in the garage, balls, rubber bones and rings and an old teddy bear, and Reggie said, “Let’s get a ball for you, Sadie,” and Sadie gave a little woof of excitement at the
word ball.

  The garage used to be kept locked but then the key had got lost and no one had got round to cutting a new one. Dr. Hunter said that the worst thing that could happen was that her car might get stolen and it was insured, so what did it matter? Mr. Hunter said that was a cavalier attitude and Dr. Hunter said, “Well, you get one cut, then,” which was probably the nearest thing to an argument between them that Reggie had ever witnessed. Mr. Hunter didn’t know about the spare car key that she kept on a shelf in the garage, behind a tin of paint (Clouded Pearl, the color that the hall had been decorated in), because then he would “go ballistic,” according to Dr. Hunter.

  The garage was small because the house was built in the days when most people didn’t own one car, let alone two, and the garage had been squashed into a small space next to the house as an afterthought, separated from the house by a narrow passage. Mr. Hunter’s big Range Rover couldn’t even get into the garage, and so it remained the snug home of Dr. Hunter’s Toyota Prius. Reggie squeezed past the car to reach the basket and pick out Sadie’s favorite, an old red rubber ball so chewed that it had lost almost all of its bounce.

  “Come on, then, old girl,” Reggie said to Sadie as she shut the garage door. It was what Dr. Hunter always said to the dog when they set off for a walk. It felt odd to be in charge of Sadie. No Dr. Hunter, no Mr. Hunter, no baby. Reggie realized she’d never been entirely alone with the dog before. They went through the gap in the hedge that let them directly into the field that today was home to three horses, all standing around rather listlessly as if they were waiting for something to happen. Reggie threw the ball and then raced round the field with the dog because that was what she liked best.

  Here was the thing. Dr. Hunter had traveled to Hawes last night. “She drove down last night,” Mr. Hunter said on the phone this morning. So why was her car in the garage?

  When they got back from their walk, the house was locked and there was no sign of Mr. Hunter. A note placed prominently on the kitchen table said, “Dear Reggie — actually I forgot — Jo suggested that maybe you would like to take our mutual friend to your place and look after her until she gets back. You’ll probably have more time at the moment than I will, anyway. Thanks, Neil.” It took Reggie a moment to realize that the note referred to the dog. Mr. Hunter seemed a different person on paper, he certainly used a lot more words. There was no mention of money for dog food, Reggie noticed.