When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  If he had been Joy, he too would have been reluctant to hand over a set of car keys to someone who looked as if he had just been released from prison or hospital or both. “Absolutely against my advice,” Harry Potter said when Jackson discharged himself. “Be it on your own head,” Dr. Foster said. “You’re a bloody idiot, mate,” Australian Mike laughed.

  The bruises and the gash in his forehead made Jackson look more criminal than victim, and the arm in a sling obviously disqualified him from driving in the eyes of any sane person, so Reggie had unstrapped his bandages and daubed the bruises on his face with her Rimmel foundation, “ ’Cause you look like you’re on the run or something.” Generally speaking, Jackson always felt like he was on the run (or something), but he didn’t bother saying so to Reggie.

  With a cavalier disregard for the law he used Andrew Decker’s driving license, which Reggie had produced with a flourish (“It was with your things”). Unfortunately, the fact that he had no other form of ID proved a bit of a stumbling block to Joy, who frowned with discontent at his lack of proven existence.

  “You could be anyone,” she said.

  “Well, not anyone,” Jackson murmured, but didn’t argue the point.

  He could have caught a train, of course, except that he couldn’t. He had got as far as the ticket office in Waverley Station (Reggie sticking to his side like a little limpet) before a wave of adrenaline caught up with him. The climbing-back-on-the-horse-immediately theory was all very well when it was just a theory (or even when it was just a horse), but when it was the nontheoretical prospect of a brutal iron horse in the shape of an InterCity 125, pulling horrific memories behind it, then it was a different matter.

  In the hospital, they had told him that he might never remember what had happened in the period before the train crash, but that wasn’t so, he was remembering more and more all the time, a patchwork of unsewn pieces — the High Chaparral theme tune on a mobile, a pair of red shoes, the unexpected sight of the dead soldier’s face when he had turned him in the mud. “CARNAGE!” said the newspaper headline they had showed him in hospital. It was mere luck that he was alive when others weren’t, a momentary lapse in concentration from the Fates that had led to him surviving and not someone else.

  The old lady with her Catherine Cookson, the woman in red, the tired suit, where were they? Jackson couldn’t help but question his right to be on his feet (more or less) when fifteen other people were lying in cold storage somewhere. He had to wonder about his alter ego. Was the real Andrew Decker still lying in the hospital somewhere — had he walked away unscathed, or was his journey fatally interrupted? The name still rang a bell in Jackson’s battered memory, but he had no idea why.

  He supposed that this was what they meant by survivor guilt. He had survived lots of things before and not felt guilty, or at least not in a way that he was conscious of. What he had felt for most of his life was that he was living on in the aftermath of a disaster, in the endless postscript of time that was his life following the murder of his sister and the suicide of his brother. He had drawn those terrible feelings inside himself, nourished them in solitary confinement until they formed the hard, black nugget of coal at the heart of his soul, but now the disaster was external, the wreckage was tangible, it was outside the room he was sleeping in.

  “We’re all survivors, Mr. B.,” Reggie said.

  In Waverley Station Jackson found himself unraveling, and for the first time in his life he started to have a panic attack. He staggered to a metal bench in the station concourse, sat down heavily, and put his head between his knees. Everyone gave him a wide berth. He supposed he must look like a beat-up drunk. He felt like he was having a heart attack. Maybe he was having a heart attack.

  “Nah,” Reggie said, taking his wrist and checking his pulse. “You’ve just got a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies. Breathe,” she advised. “It always helps.”

  Eventually the black spots before his eyes stopped dancing and his heart stopped jackhammering his ribs. He sipped water from a bottle Reggie bought at a coffee stall and felt himself returning to something like normal, or what passed for normal in the post–train crash world.

  “Let’s get one thing straight,” he said to Reggie, “this isn’t another saving-my-life situation. Understand?”

  “Totally.”

  “Post-traumatic stress or something,” he muttered.

  “Nothing to be ashamed of,” Reggie said. “It’s like” — she said the phrase with a flourish — “a badge of courage. You pulled that soldier out of the wreckage, didn’t you? Just a shame he was dead.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re a hero.”

  “No, I’m not,” Jackson said. I used to be a policeman, he thought. I used to be a man. Now I can’t step on a train.

  “Anyway,” Reggie said, “the trains are all diverted, we’d have to get off, get on a coach, get back on again. A car would be much simpler.”

  Nothing?” Joy bulldozed on. “No passport? Bank statement? Gas bill? Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” Jackson confirmed. “I’ve lost my wallet. I was in the Musselburgh train crash.”

  “There aren’t any exceptions to the rule.”

  Having no ID was less of a problem to Joy than having no credit card. “Cash?” she said incredulously at the sight of the money. “We have to have a credit card, Mr. Decker. And if your wallet was stolen, then how come you have money?” Good question, Jackson thought.

  Jackson bared his lone wolf teeth in an attempt at friendly and said, “Please. I’m just a guy trying to get home.”

  “A credit card and ID. Those are the rules.” No paserán.

  “Dad’s mum died,” Reggie said, slipping her small hand unexpectedly into Jackson’s. “We need to get home. Please.”

  Phew,” Reggie said as they headed for the Espace. Jackson pointed the gray wafer of an electronic key at the car and it gave a welcoming beep.

  Begging pathetically had got them nowhere with Joy. The fact that she had, that very morning, been made redundant (“Surplus to requirements,” she sneered, “like every other woman of my age.”) was much more effective. “You can drive off into the sunset with the bloody thing as far as I’m concerned,” she said, but only after having given herself the satisfaction of arguing them ragged.

  He used the gray plastic wafer to start the car and explained to Reggie how to put the Espace from “park” into “drive.” Reluctantly he admitted to himself that he needed her, he wasn’t sure that it was a journey he could make on his own, and not just because she knew how to strap his arm back up again and put the car into drive mode.

  Jackson eased himself into the driving seat of the Espace. It felt good, it felt like home. Driving with one hand didn’t unnerve him as much as driving with Reggie Chase in the passenger seat. Half child, half unstoppable force of nature.

  “Okay, let’s roll,” Jackson said. The dog was already asleep on the backseat.

  In a triumph of idiocy over adversity, they made it as far as Scotch Corner, stopping only twice at service stations so that Jackson could “take a few minutes.” His body craved rest, it wanted to be supine in a darkened room, not driving on the A1 with one hand. He was surfing a wave of strong painkillers given to him by Australian Mike. He was sure that if he looked closely at the label, it would have some warning about driving with them in his system, but from somewhere he had dredged up his army self, the one that kept pushing through beyond the bounds of reason. When the going gets tough, the tough take drugs.

  Reggie was making a meal of navigating. She had the disturbing habit, shared with his daughter, his real daughter, of gleefully verbalizing (and occasionally singing) every road sign — “hidden dip, sharp bend, Berwick-on-Tweed twenty-four miles, roadworks for half a mile.” He had never had a front-seat passenger apart from Marlee who could get so much enjoyment from the A1.

  “I don’t get out much,” she said cheerfully.

  She had an address for the dubious au
nt. It was in a Filofax that belonged to Joanna Hunter. Reggie also had her own bulky backpack, Joanna Hunter’s large handbag, which she was concerned with to the point of obsession (“Why would she leave it behind? Why?”), a plastic carrier bag containing dog food, plus the dog itself, of course. She didn’t travel light. Jackson had, literally, the clothes he stood up in. It was a kind of freedom, he supposed.

  “Here, here, we have to go right here,” Reggie said urgently as they approached the big junction at Scotch Corner.

  Tomorrow he would see his wife. His wife, shiny and brand-new. And have a lot of new-wife kind of sex, although, to be honest, sex was the last thing he felt capable of at the moment. A warm bed and a large whisky sounded much more appealing. He would go home and carry on with his life. His journey had been broken (but not fatally), he had been broken (but not fatally), although he had a small, nagging doubt that he might not have been put back together in quite the same way as before.

  “Right at Scotch Corner,” Reggie said, “and that takes us into Wensleydale. Where the cheese comes from.”

  He had been here on Wednesday (in the pre–train crash world. A different country.). He had bought his OS map in Hawes, a newspaper, a cheese-and-pickle roll. They would pass within a cat’s whisker of where his son, Nathan, lived. They could visit, stop off at the village green, they could park outside Julia’s house. He was back where he had started. Again.

  At Scotch Corner he had been obediently following Reggie’s slightly hysterical instructions to go right, when some kind of slippage occurred, in the car, in him, he wasn’t sure. He wondered if he’d been asleep with his eyes open. This was what happened when you drove in the aftermath of a concussion, you didn’t turn the wheel far enough and then you tried to compensate by turning it too far and then you made the mistake of slamming on the brakes too violently, mainly because of a small frantic Scottish voice yelling in your ear and disturbing the gyroscope in your brain, so that you skidded in a scream of rubber and clipped a four-door Smart Car, sending it spinning like a top across the road, and you were yourself clipped by an army jeep coming from Catterick Camp. The Espace gave as good as it got, but they still ended up facing the wrong way, slewed on the verge, with their teeth rattling in their heads. The dog had fallen onto the floor when they (Jackson sharing the blame equally with the car) lost control but picked itself up now with a certain aplomb.

  “Phew,” Reggie said when they finally came to a stop.

  “Fuck,” Jackson said.

  Take a deep breath, sir,” the traffic cop said, “and then breathe out into this monitor.” He held a digital breathalyzer the size of a mobile phone towards Jackson, who sighed and said, “I haven’t been drinking,” but he supposed he looked in such poor shape that any sensible officer of the law would be suspicious of him.

  No one was injured, which was a relief. One disastrous crash was enough for anyone’s week. “It’s me,” Reggie said gloomily, “I attract these things.” They had helped out the dazed passengers from the Smart Car and sat them down at the side of the road. The army guys had put hazard lights out and phoned the police.

  “Fuckwit,” one of them muttered at Jackson. Jackson tended to agree with him.

  Despite the fact that the breath test was negative, the traffic cop wasn’t happy. “Mr. Decker, sir?” he said, scrutinizing his driving license. “Is this your vehicle?”

  “It’s a rental.”

  “And what relation is this young lady to you?”

  “I’m his daughter,” Reggie piped up. The traffic cop looked her up and down, took in her bruises, the large dog glued to her side, the variety of bags she was toting. He frowned. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.” He raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Sweartogod.”

  An ambulance arrived, surplus to requirements, like Joy. Another unnecessary one followed on behind, siren wailing. By now it looked like a major accident scene, traffic cones, lane closures, emergency vehicles, a lot of noise on the police radios, God knows how many attending officers, including a large incident van. Considering that no one was injured, not even walking wounded, the tension and excitement in the air seemed out of proportion to the circumstances. Perhaps it was a slow day on the A1.

  “I used to be a policeman,” he said to the officer who had breathalyzed him.

  He hadn’t had much of a positive response to this statement lately, but he wasn’t expecting to be suddenly brought down by two officers who seemed to come out of nowhere and who flattened him to the tarmac before he could say anything helpful, like “Mind my arm because you’re ripping my stitches out.” Luckily, Reggie had a good pair of lungs for someone so small and jumped up and down a lot, asking them if they couldn’t see his arm was in a sling and that he was an injured man — which didn’t go down well with the army boys, who wanted to know why he was driving at all, then, but Reggie was more than a match for a bunch of squaddies. It was like watching a Jack Russell fending off a pack of Dobermans.

  A police radio crackled, and he heard a voice say, “Yeah, we’ve got the nominal here,” and Jackson wondered who the wanted man was that they’d collared. He sat on the road while Reggie inspected his arm. At least he wasn’t pumping out blood like spilled petrol all over the road, just a couple of stitches out, although he still felt squeamish when he looked at the wound in his arm. Reggie was coaxed away by one of the paramedics, and then, without warning, a police officer cuffed his good arm and, speaking into the radio on his shoulder, said, “We’re taking the nominal to hospital,” so it turned out that Jackson was the wanted man. He couldn’t think why, but somehow it didn’t surprise him.

  Sitting in the A and E waiting room in hospital in Darlington, bookended by two police officers as silent as funeral mutes, Jackson pondered why they were treating him like a criminal. Driving on someone else’s license? Kidnapping and beating up a minor (“I’m sixteen!”)? What had happened to his unshakable little Scottish shadow? He hoped she was giving his details to reception and not locked up in custody somewhere. (The dog was in the back of a police car, awaiting a verdict on its immediate future.) Not that Reggie knew his details. He had a wife and a child (two children) and a name. That was all anyone needed to know, really.

  Another couple of uniforms put in an appearance, and one of them cautioned him and passed on the interesting information that there was a warrant out for his arrest.

  “Are you going to tell me why?”

  “Failure to comply with the conditions imposed on you when you were released from prison.”

  “You see, I’m not actually Andrew Decker,” Jackson said.

  “That’s what they all say, sir.”

  He had a feeling it was going to take more than Reggie jumping up and down shouting to get them out of whatever trouble they were in. Where was a friendly policeman when you needed one? Detective Inspector Louise Monroe, for example, she would do nicely at this moment.

  A phone rang, a mobile. The police officers both looked at Jackson and he shrugged. “Don’t have a phone,” he said. “Don’t have anything.”

  Indicating the pile of bags that Reggie had left at his feet, one of the officers said, “Well, it’s in that bag,” in a tone of voice that for a brief, bizarre moment reminded Jackson of his first wife. With some difficulty — stitches ripped, good arm handcuffed to a police officer, et cetera, he extricated the phone from the front pocket of Reggie’s backpack and answered it. “Hello, hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  Me? Who was me, he wondered.

  “Louise.”

  “That’s amazing —” He got no further (I was just thinking about you) because the police officer who was handcuffed to him leaned over and pressed his finger on a button on the phone and ended the call. “Mobiles aren’t allowed in hospitals, Mr. Decker,” he said with a look of satisfaction on his face. “Of course, you might not know that, having been away for so long.”

  “Away? Where’ve I been?”

  Half an
hour later, when he was still waiting for a doctor to look at his arm, she appeared in person, marching through the automatic doors of the A and E as if she were going to break them down if they didn’t open fast enough. Jeans and a sweater and a leather jacket. Just right. He had forgotten how much he fancied her.

  “The cavalry’s arrived,” he murmured to his yellow-jacketed bookends.

  “You’ve finally gone insane, then?” she said testily to Jackson.

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” he said. She was joined by a youthful sidekick who looked as if he would jump off a cliff if she told him to. He would do well, Louise liked obedience.

  She flashed her warrant card at the bookends and said, “I’ve come for the one-armed bandit. Uncuff him.”

  One of the bookends dug his heels in and said, “We’re waiting for the Doncaster police to come and get him. With respect, ma’am, he’s out of your jurisdiction.”

  “Trust me,” Louise said. “This one is mine.”

  Reggie appeared and said, “Hello, Chief Inspector M.”

  “You know her?” Jackson said to Reggie.

  “You know him?” the sidekick said to Louise.

  “We all know each other?” Reggie said. “How’s that for a coincidence?”

  “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen,” Jackson said, and Louise said, “Shut it, sunshine,” as if she were auditioning for The Sweeney. He put one, uncuffed hand in the air and said, “It’s a fair cop, guv,” and she replied with a curse so black (and blue) that even the bookends blanched.

  “Not to be a nuisance or anything,” Jackson said to her, “but I need stitching up. If I haven’t been already.”