When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  “We hardly know each other,” she said when he proposed.

  “Well, that’s what marriage is for,” Jackson said, although his experience of marriage tended to indicate the opposite — the longer he and Josie were married, the less they seemed to understand each other.

  Tessa didn’t change her name to his, she had never “seen herself” as Mrs. Brodie, she said. Josie hadn’t changed her name either when she married him. The last “Mrs. Brodie” that Jackson knew was his mother. Jackson’s sister, an old-fashioned girl in every sense, used to tell him that she couldn’t wait to be married and ditch her maiden name and “become Mrs. Somebody Else.” That’s what she was — a maiden, a virgin, “saving herself for Mr. Right.” There were always boys after her but she still hadn’t found anyone steady when she was raped and murdered. She had a bottom drawer, a little chest in her room that was neatly layered with tea towels and embroidered tray cloths and a stainless-steel cutlery set that she was adding to, one item a month. All for the life to come that never came. All these things seemed so far away now, not just Niamh herself but all the girls who saved embroidered tray cloths and stainless-steel cutlery sets. Where were they now?

  Most people carried a couple of photo albums with them through their lives, but he had never come across a single photograph in Tessa’s Covent Garden flat. Her parents were dead, killed in a car crash, but there was no sign they had ever existed. There was nothing from her childhood, no souvenirs of the past at all. “I live in the past in my job,” she said. “I like to keep my life in the present. And Ruskin says that every increased possession loads us with weariness, and he’s right.”

  There was something spartan in Tessa’s makeup that was appealing, especially after Julia, a woman who inclined to the rococo, a subject on which she had once given him an entertaining lecture that had somehow involved sex (typical Julia). Julia was much more educated than she allowed you to believe. Tessa would have been bemused by Julia if she had known her. As it was, she was indifferent, “your ex,” no interest, no jealousy (but what if she had known about the baby?). There was something refreshingly neutral about Tessa. He would never have thought he would find neutral an attractive adjective for a woman. Just goes to show.

  They had known each other for four months, they had been married for two. He had been engaged to Josie for over two years before they married, so he had no personal evidence that a long courtship was the foundation of a long marriage. (“Oh, I think we were married long enough,” Josie said.) Nonetheless, the sudden impulsive marriage to Tessa had been completely out of character for him. “No, it wasn’t,” Josie said, “you’ve always been the most uxorious of men.” “No, it wasn’t,” Julia said, “you were desperate to marry me, and think how disastrous that would have been.” For I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife. He was neither wanton nor lascivious (or he liked to think he wasn’t), but being married had always seemed an ideal state to him. The Garden of Eden, the paradise lost.

  “You’re not actually very good at being married,” Josie said. “You just think you are.” “You’re a lone wolf, Jackson,” Julia said. “You just can’t admit it.” Josie and Julia lived uncomfortably in his brain, conflated into the voice of his conscience, the twin recording angels of his behavior. “Marry in haste,” Josie’s voice said. “Repent at leisure,” Julia’s concluded.

  “What day is it?” he asked the policewoman.

  “Friday.”

  Tessa flew back into Heathrow first thing on Monday. He would be home by then, if not before. He would be there to meet her off the plane, as promised. It was good for a man to have a goal, it was good for a man to know where he was going. Jackson was going home.

  They had met at a party. Jackson never went to parties. It was the slimmest of chances, a confluence of the planets, a ripple in time.

  He had bumped into his old commanding officer in the military police, in Regent Street of all places — again, not an endroit where Jackson was usually to be found. The Fates had clocked him crossing Regent Street, but for once in a good way.

  His old boss was a rather roguish guy called Bernie, whom Jackson hadn’t seen for over twenty years. They had never had much in common apart from the job, but they had got on well and Jackson was surprised by his own pleasure at this unexpected encounter, so when Bernie said, “Look, I’ve got a few folk coming round next week to the flat for a drink, as casual as it gets, why not join us?” he had been tempted before eventually demurring, at which point he had found himself at the end of a charm offensive from Bernie that finally proved irresistible — or rather, it had become easier to say yes than to keep on saying no. In retrospect, he realized it wasn’t so much pleasure at seeing Bernie as it was at unexpectedly getting a reminder of a life that was now lost, two old soldiers reminiscing about the past.

  He had been surprised by two things. The first was Bernie’s flat in Battersea, which was plushly decorated and full of things — furniture, ornaments, paintings — that even Jackson could recognize as “good.” Bernie had mentioned something about being “in security” (what else?) when they met, but Jackson had never suspected that security could be so well remunerated. Jackson didn’t mention his own good fortune.

  The second surprise was the guests Bernie had assembled. “A few folk round for a drink” had transformed into what Jackson overheard a guest refer to as “one of Bernie’s famous soirées.” Jackson was pretty sure he’d never been to a “soirée” before.

  The flat was peopled by well-dressed London types — men in hip spectacles and women in ugly and extraordinarily uncomfortable-looking shoes. Jackson was innately suspicious of well-dressed men — real men (i.e., men from the north) didn’t have the time or the inclination to shop for designer clothes, and he believed that no woman should wear a pair of shoes that she couldn’t, if necessary, run away in. (Although a couple of years ago he had observed a girl simply throwing her shoes away in order to run, but she had been Russian and crazy, albeit worryingly attractive. He still thought about her.) None of the women at Bernie’s “soirée” looked as if they would be prepared to toss away their Manolos and Jimmy Choos to make a quick getaway. Yes, he knew the names of designer shoemakers, and no, that wasn’t the kind of stuff real men from the north should know, but he had been stuck in Toulouse airport with Marlee last summer and had been tutored relentlessly by her from the pages of Heat and OK!.

  Bernie greeted him effusively at the door of the flat and led him into the already slightly overheated crowd. How Bernie knew these people was puzzling. None of them seemed like the natural social circle of a fifty-year-old ex-RMP guy.

  “Cocktail?” Bernie offered, and Jackson said, “It’s against my religion, got any beer?” and Bernie laughed and, punching him on the arm, said, “Same old Jackson.” Jackson didn’t think he was the same old Jackson, he had shed several skins since last seeing Bernie (and acquired a few new ones), but he didn’t say so.

  Jackson was no good at parties. He couldn’t do small talk. Hi, my name’s Jackson Brodie, I used to be a policeman. Maybe it was something to do with the lives he had led, first a soldier and then a policeman — neither profession exactly fostered idle chat. At first sight the people at Bernie’s party (sorry, soirée) seemed strangely vacuous, as if they’d been hired for the night to play at being festive. Jackson found himself skulking around the fringes of the gathering like a latecomer to the water hole, wondering how long he had to continue to endure the evening before he could make his gruff excuses and leave.

  At which point, Tessa pitched up at his elbow and murmured into his ear, “Isn’t this ghastly?” Jackson was pleased to note that not only was she wearing a simple linen dress, made all the more attractive in contrast to the odd garb sported by some of the other women, but also low-heeled sandals that she could easily have run away in. She didn’t choose to run but stayed close to his side. “You seem like a safe harbor,” she said.

  After five minutes of conversation made awkwa
rd by the volume of noise in the room, he had said boldly to her, “Fancy getting out of here?” and she said, “I can’t think of anything I’d like better,” and they’d gone to a pub over the river in Chelsea, not really Jackson’s kind of place but nonetheless a thousand times better than Bernie’s. They had talked until closing time over a civilized bottle of cabernet sauvignon before he walked her all the long way home to her flat (“smaller than a postage stamp”) in Covent Garden. On the final stretch he took her hand (“Shy boys get nothing” — the words of his long-dead Lothario of a brother came unexpectedly into his head), and when they reached her door, he had planted a firm but decorous kiss on her cheek and was rewarded by her saying, “Shall we do this again? How about tomorrow?”

  He couldn’t have designed a better woman. She was cheerful, optimistic, and sweet. She was funny, even comical sometimes, and much smarter than he was but, unlike the previous women in his life, didn’t find it necessary to remind him of this fact at every turn. She was graceful (“a lot of ballet when I was young”) and athletic (“tennis, ditto”), and liked animals and children but not to the point of being oversentimental. She had a job she loved but that she was never overwhelmed by. She was fifteen years younger than he was (“Lucky dog,” Bernie said later when he “caught up” with Jackson) and hadn’t yet lost the glow of youthful enthusiasm, seemed, in fact, as if she might never lose it. She had long light-brown hair cut in a heavy-fringed style that made her look like an actress or a model from the sixties (Jackson’s preferred look in a woman). She was someone who didn’t need looking after but who nonetheless was properly grateful when he did look after her. She could drive and cook and even sew, knew how to do simple DIY, was surprisingly frugal but also knew how to be generous (witness the Breitling watch — her wedding present to him), and was the mistress of at least two sexual positions that Jackson had never tried before (hadn’t even known existed, actually, but he kept that to himself). She was, in short, how God intended women to be.

  How come she knew a guy like Bernie? “Friend of a friend of a friend,” she said vaguely. “I don’t usually go to parties. I end up standing in a corner like a standard lamp. I’m not much good at small talk. I was taught by nuns until I was eleven—you learn silence early on.” Jackson’s sister, Niamh, had been a convent girl. When she was thirteen she announced she wanted to become a nun. Their mother, despite being a devout Irish Catholic, was terrified. She had been looking forward to a future where a married Niamh popped in and out of her house, trailing babies in her wake. To everyone’s relief, Niamh’s enthusiasm for becoming a bride of Christ proved to be short-lived. Jackson was only six at the time, but even then he knew that nuns spent their lives imprisoned away from their families and he couldn’t bear the idea that Niamh, so full of life, could be shut away from him forever.

  And then, of course, she was.

  He could feel his headaches breeding, stacking themselves one upon the other.

  When he woke again, the girl was sitting there, blinking at him like a baby owl. She was speaking nonsense. “Dr. Foster went to Gloucester, all in a shower of rain.”

  Jackson could hear children’s voices out in the larger ward, singing Christmas carols, quite badly. He noticed for the first time some halfhearted gaudy decorations hanging in his room. He had forgotten all about Christmas. He wondered if the girl was something to do with the carol concert. She looked about the same age as Marlee and was gazing at him intently as if she were expecting him to do something extraordinary.

  “They said you were a soldier,” she said.

  “A long time ago.”

  “The nurse said. That’s how they knew your blood group.”

  “Yeah.” His voice was still croaky. He was a weak version of himself, a flawed clone, everything working but nothing quite right.

  “My dad was a soldier.”

  He struggled into a sitting position, and she helped him with the pillows. “Yeah? What regiment?” he asked, unexpectedly entering into his conversational comfort zone.

  “Royal Scots,” the girl said.

  “Were you here yesterday?” he said. “The day before today,” he clarified. He was pleased to see that he was getting the hang of time again. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, that was how it went, one day after the next. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Julia had done Macbeth at Birmingham Rep, a crazed, blood-boltered Lady Macbeth. “Acting with her hair again,” Amelia snorted in the seat next to him. Jackson thought she was good, better than he’d expected anyway.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve only just found you.”

  He wondered if she was one of those volunteers, like prison visitors, who come and see people who don’t have anyone else. (Because apparently he didn’t.) Perhaps the army had sent her, like a care package.

  “You would have bled to death,” she said. She seemed very interested in his blood. His veins ran with the blood of strangers, he wondered if that had any implications for him. Had he lost his immunity to measles? Had he acquired a predisposition to something else? (Something that ran in the blood.) Was he carrying the DNA of strangers? There were a lot of unanswered questions surrounding his transfusion. Was this girl one of his donors? Too young, surely.

  “Exsanguinated,” she said, pronouncing it carefully.

  “Right.”

  “Exsanguinated,” she said again. “Sangria comes from the same root, the Latin for blood. Bloodred wine. Wine-dark sea.”

  “Do I know you?” Jackson said. It suddenly struck him that she might be a fellow survivor of the train crash. She had a nasty bruise on her forehead.

  “Not really,” she said. Not a very helpful answer. “Are you going to eat that toast?” she asked, eyeing the unappetizing food still in front of him.

  “Knock yourself out,” Jackson said, pushing the bed-tray towards her. “Have we met?” he pursued.

  “In a way,” she said, her mouth full of toast.

  His headache, blissfully absent when he woke, was beginning to throb again.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said.

  “Sorry, no. There’s a lot of things I don’t remember at the moment. Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess? I really don’t think I have the energy to guess.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to. It would take you forever.” She looked pleased with herself at this idea. She took a little dramatic pause from eating toast and said, “I saved your life.”

  “I saved your life.” What did that mean? He didn’t understand. “How?”

  “CPR, artery compression. At the train crash. At the side of the track.”

  “You saved my life,” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  At last he understood. “You’re the person who saved my life.”

  “Yes.” She giggled at his slowness. He found himself grinning, in fact, he couldn’t stop grinning. He felt oddly grateful that his life had been saved by a giggling child and not some burly paramedic.

  “They did their bit, as well,” she said. “But it was me that kept you alive in the beginning.”

  She had breathed life into him, literally. His breath was hers. Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. More rote learning from some murky place in his spiritual past.

  What on earth could he say to her? It took a while, but Jackson got there eventually.

  “Thank you,” he said. He was still grinning.

  “How about the Corn Flakes? You gonna eat them?”

  So, technically speaking, you belong to me.”

  “I’m sorry?” Her name was Reggie. A man’s name.

  “You’re in my thrall.” She seemed delighted by the word thrall. “You can only be released by reciprocation.”

  “Reciprocation?”

  “If you save my life.” She smiled at him and her small features were illuminated. “Plus, I’m responsible for you now until you do.”

  “Do what?”
>
  “Save my life. It’s a Native American belief. I read about it in a book.”

  “Books aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” Jackson said. “How old are you?”

  “Older than I look. Believe me.”

  What did she mean he “belonged” to her? Perhaps he had mortgaged his soul after all, not to the devil but to this funny little Scottish girl.

  Dr. Foster put her head round the door of the ward and, frowning at the girl, said, “Don’t tire him out with talking. Five more minutes,” she added, holding up her hand in an emphatic gesture as if they needed to count her fingers to know what five was.

  “Do you understand?” she said pointedly to Reggie.

  “Totally,” the girl said. To Jackson, she said, “I have to go anyway, I have a dog waiting outside for me. I’ll be back.”

  Jackson realized he was feeling much better. He had been saved. He had been saved for the future. His own.

  When you had a future, a couple of nurses could gang up on you and remove your catheter without any anesthetic, or even any warning, and then force you out of bed, and make you hobble in your flimsy, open-backed hospital gown to the bathroom, where they encourage you to “try and pee” on your own. Jackson had never previously appreciated that such a basic bodily function could be both so painful and so gratifying at the same time. I piss, therefore I am.

  He would look at everything differently from now on. The reborn bit had finally kicked in. He was a new Jackson. Alleluia.

  Dr. Foster Went to Gloucester

  All in a shower of rain. He stepped in a puddle right up to his middle and never went that way again.’ I bet people quote that to her all the time.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Foster.”

  “I bet they don’t,” Jackson Brodie said.

  She had finally found him and now she was keeping a faithful vigil by his bedside, Greyfriars Reggie.