When Will There Be Good News? (11 page)

Now, ironically, ifpeople asked him what he did, he said, 'Security,' in a cryptic, don't-ask-me-anything-else tone of voice that he'd learned in the army and perfected in the police. In Jackson's long experience 'security' covered a multitude of sins but actually it was pretty straightforward, he had a card in his wallet that said 'Jackson Brodie -Security Consultant' ('consultant', now there was a word that covered an even greater multitude of sins). He didn't need the money, he needed the self-respect. A man couldn't lie idle. Working for Bernie nught not be a righteous cause (in his heart Jackson was a crusader, not a pilgrim) but it was better than kicking his heels at home all day long.

And being in security was better than saying, 'I live off an old woman's money,' because, ofcourse, the money that his client had left him in her will had in no way been deserved and it hung as heavily on him as if he carried it in a sack on his back. He owned a money tree, it seemed, having invested most of the two million his returns grew incrementally all the time. (It was true what they said, money made money.)

What's more he'd managed, more or less, to keep to the ethical side of the street. Jackson reckoned there was enough misery in the world without it being funded by him, although he had such a big spread of alternative energy portfolios that when the oil ran out he was going to profit from the end of the-world-as-we-knowit. 'Like Midas,' Julia said. 'Everything you touch turns to gold:

In his previous life, when bad luck dogged his heels like a faithful hound and when everything he touched turned to shit, he had barely made the mortgage each month and the occasional lottery ticket was the only investment he made. And you could be sure that if he had put money into stocks and shares (laughably unlikely) the global market would have collapsed the next day. Now he couldn't give the stuff away. Well, no, that wasn't strictly true, but Jackson wasn't quite ready to go all Zen and divest himself of his worldly assets. ('Then quit whining,' his ex-wife said.)

Jackson had managed to get an uncomfortable seat at a table for four, near the end of the carriage. Next to him, at the window, was a man in a tired suit, intent on his laptop. Jackson expected the screen to be full of tables and statistics but instead there were screeds of words. Jackson looked away, numbers were impersonal things to cast an eye over but another man's words had an intimacy about them. The man's tie was loosened and he gave off a faint smell of beer and perspiration as if he'd been away from home too long. There were two women seated on the other side of the table: one was old and armed with a Catherine Cookson novel, the other, leafing indifferently through a celebrity magazine, was a fortyish blonde, buxom as an overstuffed turkey. She was wearing siren-red lipstick and a top to match that was half a size too tight and which burned like a signal fire in front ofJackson's eyes. Jackson was surprised she didn't have 'Up for It' tattooed on her forehead. The old woman looked blue with cold despite wearing a hat, gloves and scarf and a heavy winter coat. Jackson was glad of the North Face jacket that he'd donned as part of his disguise and then felt guilty and offered it to the old woman. She SHuled and shook her head as ifsomeone long ago had warned her not to speak to strangers on trains.

The suit next to him coughed, an unhealthy, phlegmy noise, and Jackson wondered if he should offer up his jacket to him as well. Strangers on a train. If there was an emergency would they help each other? (Never overestimate people.) Or would it be every woman for herself? That was the way to survive in a plane or a train, you had to ignore everyone and everything, get out at any cost, gnaw off a limb -someone else's if necessary -climb over seats, climb over people, forget anything your mother ever taught you about manners because the people who got to the exit were the people who, literally, lived to tell the tale.

The aftermath of a bad train crash was like a battlefield. Jackson knew, he'd attended one at the beginning of his career in the civilian police and it had been worse than anything he'd seen in the army.

There'd been a small child trapped in the wreckage, they could hear it calling for its mother but they couldn't even begin to get to it beneath the tons of train.

After a while the crying stopped but it continued in Jackson's dreams for months afterwards. The child -a boy -was eventually rescued, but strangely that didn't mollifY the horror of recalling its sobs (Mummy, Mummy). Of course, this was not long after Jackson himself had become a parent to Marlee, a condition that had left him torn and raw and completely at odds with his pre-natal preoccupations which had mainly revolved around choosing a pram with the kind ofmasculine attention to specs that he would normally have afforded a car (Lockable front swivel wheels? Adjustable handle height? Multi-position seat?). The mechanics of fatherhood turned out to be infinitely more primitive. He fingered the plastic bag in his pocket. A different pregnancy, a different child. His. He remembered the surge of emotion he had felt earlier in the day when he had touched Nathan's small head. Love. Love wasn't sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn't patient, love wasn't kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.

He hadn't seen Julia in her later stages. Short and sexy, he imagined that in pregnancy she would be ripely voluptuous, although she told him that she had piles and varicose veins and was 'almost spherical'. They had maintained a low-grade kind of communication with each other, he phoned her and she told him to sod off, but sometimes they spoke as though nothing had ever come between them. Yet still she maintained the baby wasn't his.

He had visited her in the hospital afterwards. Walking into the sixberth maternity ward he had taken a blow to the heart when he caught sight of her with the baby cradled in her arms. She was propped up on pillows with her wild hair loose about her shoulders, looking for all the world like a madonna -this vision spoiled only by the interloper, Mr Arty-Farty photographer, lying next to her on the bed gazing adoringly at the baby.

'Well, look at this -the unholy family,' Jackson said (because he couldn't help himself -the story of his life where shooting off his mouth to his women was concerned).

'Go away, Jackson,' Julia said placidly. 'You know this isn't a good idea.' Mr Arty-Farty, a little more pro-active, said, 'Get out of here or I'll deck you.'

'Fat chance of that, you big pansy,' Jackson said (because he couldn't help himself). The guy was pampered and unfit, Jackson liked to think that he could have taken him out with one punch.

'The better part of valour is discretion, Jackson,' Julia said, a warning note creeping into her voice. Trust Julia to be quoting at a time like this. She put her little finger in the baby's mouth and smiled down at him
. A
world apart. Jackson had never seen her so happy and he might have turned on his heel and left, out of deference to Julia's new-found redemption, but Mr Arty-Farty (his name was actually Jonathan Carr) said, 'There's nothing for you here, Brodie,' as if he owned this nativity scene and Jackson felt himself go so beyond reason that he would have beaten the guy up right there on the floor of the ward, with nursing mothers and newborn babies for an audience, ifJulia's baby (his baby) hadn't started crying and shamed him into retreat. Jackson had the grace to be mortified by this memory.

And now the two of them, soft southerners to the core, were living in his homeland, his heartland, while every day he walked a step further away. And Julia living a country life as a country wife beggared belief. He could believe in a billion angels dancing on a pinhead more readily than he could believe in Julia cooking on an Aga. Yes, OK, the Dales weren't part of his heritage of dirt and industrial decay, but they were within the boundaries of God's own county, which was also Jackson's own county, flowing in the stream of his blood, laid down in the limestone of his bones even though neither ofhis parents was born here
. W
as it in his son's DNA, carried now in Jackson's pocket? The blueprint of his child. A chain of molecules, a chain of evidence. There would be traces of his sister in that single hair. Niamh, killed so long ago now that she existed more as a story than a person, a tale to be told, My sister was murdered whe
n
she was eighteen.

He took his BlackBerry out and put it on the table in front of him. He was half expecting a text message. Arrived safely. As none came, he texted, 'Miss you,Jx'. That passed a minute or two. He left the phone out so that he could see if he received a reply.

The old woman opposite sighed and closed her eyes as ifthe book she was reading had quite worn her out
. T
he woman in red -neither lady nor librarian but a good old-fashioned tart (rather like Julia) could have been the same age as his strolling woman. Where was she now? Still walking up hill and down dale? The suit took out a battered-looking packet ofcheese and onion crisps from his briefcase and in a rather reluctant act of camaraderie silently offered them around.

The women refused but Jackson took a handful. He was starving and his chances of getting to the buffet car were minimal given the crush in the carriages
. L
fever thou gavest meat or drink, the fire shall never make thee shrink. If meat or drink thou ne'er gavst nane, the fire will burn thee to the bare bane. That damned dirge. Had the suit bought his way into heaven with a packet of cheese and onion crisps? Jackson should have insisted that the old woman took his North Face jacket otherwise he might find himself shivering his way through the fires ofhell.

The crisps tasted unnatural and made him thirsty. There was a throbbing behind his eyes. He wanted to be home.

It was black outside the carriage window, not even a pinprick of light from a house, and rain lashed incessantly on the glass. It was deeply inhospitable out there. Where were they? He guessed somewhere in the no-man's-land between York and Doncaster. Closer to his birthplace. His birthright gone, sold off with the family silver in the eighties by That Woman.

Had they even stopped at York yet? If they had he hadn't noticed. He had a feeling he might have dozed off for a while.

He found himself thinking about Louise. They hadn't really kept in touch,just the occasional text from her when he suspected she was drunk. There'd never been anything between them, at least nothing that was ever spoken. Their relationship in Edinburgh two years ago could have been described as a professional one if you were playing fast and loose with the dictionary. They had never kissed, never touched, although Jackson was pretty sure she had thought about it. He certainly had. A lot.

Then a couple of months ago she announced that she was getting married, an event that seemed so unlikely (if not absurd) that he suspected she was joking. He had thought at one point that he might feature in her future and the next thing he knew he had been dropkicked into her past. They were two people who had missed each other, sailed right past in the night and into different harbours. The one that got away. He was sorry. He wished her well. Sort of.

How ironic that both Julia and Louise, the two women he'd felt closest to in his recent past, had both unexpectedly got married, and neither of them to him.

They passed through a station at speed and Jackson struggled and failed to read the name. 'Where was that?' he asked the woman in red.

'I didn't see, sorry.' She took out a mirror from her handbag and reapplied her lipstick, stretching her mouth and then baring her teeth to check for any smears. Jackson's suited neighbour tensed briefl
y
and paused in his incessant typing, staring sightlessly at the laptop screen, not daring to look at the woman, but not quite able to keep his eyes away from her either. Some animal instinct briefly flared and flickered inside his suit but then it must have burned itself out because he slumped a little and returned to the tap-tap-tapping on his keyboard.

The woman in red ran her tongue over her lips and smiled at Jackson. He wondered if she was going to give him a tangible sign, nod in the direction of the toilets, expecting him to inch his way after her, squeezing past the blank-eyed squaddies to take her, thrusting urgently against the soap-and-grime-smeared little sink, with his hastily dropped trousers in an undignified pool around his ankles. For I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife. A memory of Julia, playing Helen in Doctor Faustus in a stripped-down production above a smoky London pub. Jackson wondered what, if anything, would drive him to be tempted to barter his soul to the devil, or indeed anyone. To save a life, he supposed. His child. (His children.) Would he follow the woman in red if she gave him the sign? Good question. He had never been what you would call promiscuous (an
d
he had never once been unfaithful, making him almost a saint) but he was a man and he had taken it where he found it. Oh, Man, thy name is Folly.

When he glanced at her reflection in the dark glass
of the
window she was innocently reading her trashy rag again. Perhaps she hadn't been giving him the come-on after all, perhaps his imagination was charged by the foetid atmosphere of the carriage. He was relieved he'd been spared the test.

Julia had done it in train toilets with complete strangers, and once on a plane, although admittedly that had been with himself, not a stranger (at the time anyway, different now). Julia gobbled up life because she knew what the alternative was, her catalogue of dead sisters a constant reminder of life's fragility. He was glad she'd had a son, she might worry less for him than she would for a daughter.