When Will There Be Good News? (12 page)

And now, Amelia, the only sister she had left, had cancer, her breasts at this very moment being 'lopped off' according to Julia. They had spoken, briefly, on the phone, Jackson wanting to be sure that Julia wasn't at home before heading north to see his child. Their child.

'Poor, poor Milly,' Julia said, more choked up than usual. Grief always brought on her asthma.

Once, on holiday with Julia in sunnier times, he couldn't remember where now, Jackson remembered seeing a painting by some Italian Renaissance guy he'd never heard of, showing the martyred St Agatha holding her severed yet perfect breasts up high, on a plate, as if she were a waitress serving up a pair of blancmanges. No hint
of the
torture that had preceded this amputation -the sexual assaults, the stretching on the rack, the starvation, the rolling
of her
body over burning coals. St Agatha was a saint whom Jackson was acquainted with only too well -after his mother was diagnosed with the breast cancer that would kill her she had wasted a lot of her time praying to St Agatha, the patron saint of the disease.

He was shaken out of his thoughts by the old woman suddenl
y
asking him if they had passed the Angel of the North and would sh
e
be able to see it in the dark? Jackson wasn't sure what to say to he
r
-how to break the news that she was travelling the wrong way, that this train was bound for London, and she had endured several hours in cramped, unpleasant conditions and was now going to have to turn round and do it all over again. The next stop would probably be Doncaster, maybe Grantham, birthplace of That Woman, the very person who had single-handedly dismantled Britain. ('Oh, for God's sake,Jackson, give it a rest,' he heard his ex-wife's voice in his head.)

'We're not going that way,' he said gently to the old woman.

'Of course we are,' she said. 'Where do you think we're going?'

He slept. When he woke up the suit was still tap-tapping on his laptop
. J
ackson checked for text messages but there were none. A station flashed by and the old woman gave him a smug look. 'Dunbar,' she announced, like an old soothsayer.

'Dunbar?' Jackson said.

'The train terminates at Waverley.'

She was obviously a little senile,Jackson thought. Unless ...

The woman in red leaned over the table, displaying her own ample and healthy breasts for his connoisseurship, and said to him, 'Do you have the time?'

'The time?' Jackson echoed. (The time for what? A quickie in the train toilet?) She tapped her wrist, in an exaggerated dumbshow. 'The time, do you know what time it is?'

The time. (Idiot.) He looked at his Breitling and was surprised to see it was nearly eight. They should be in London by now. Unless ... 'Ten to eight,' he said to the woman in red. 'Where is this train going to?'

'Edinburgh,' she said, just as a young guy who had been weaving his way unsteadily through the carriage stumbled and pitched towards Jackson, clutching on to his can of lager as if it was going to stop him from falling. Jackson jumped up, not so much to save the guy as to save himself from being showered with lager. 'Steady there, sir,' he said, instinctively finding his voice ofauthority, while using his body weight to prop the guy up. He remembered the sheep from this afternoon. The drunk guy was more pliable. He stared blearily at Jackson, confused by the 'sir', unsure whether he was under attack or not, probably no one but the police had previously addressed him in such a polite manner. He started to say something, slurred and incoherent, when the carriage jolted suddenly and he staggered and fell headlong, slipping through Jackson's fumbled attempt to catch him.

There was a certain amount of alarm registered by the carriage's occupants at this unexpected stutter in the train's progress but it was soon replaced with relief. 'What was that?' Jackson heard someone say and another voice laughed, 'Wrong kind of leaves on the line probably.' It was all very British. The suit seemed the most twitchy. 'Everything's going to be fine: Jackson said and immediately thought, Don't tempt fate.

Julia believed in the Fates (let's face it,Julia believed in everything and anything). She believed they had 'their eye on you' and if they didn't then they were certainly looking for you, so it was best not to draw attention to yourself. They had been in the car once, stuck in traffic and running late to catch a ferry, and Jackson said, 'It's fine, I'm sure we're going to make it: and Julia had ducked down dramatically in the passenger seat as if she was being shot at and hissed, 'Shush, they'll hear us.'

'Who will hear us?' Jackson puzzled.

'The Fates.' Jackson had actually glanced in his rear-view mirror as ifthey might be travelling in the car behind. 'Don't tempt them:Julia said. And once on a plane that had been bucking with turbulence he had held her hand and said, 'It won't last long: and been subjected to the same histrionic performance as if the Fates were riding on the wing of the 747. 'Don't put your head above the parapet: Julia said. Jackson had innocently enquired whether the Fates were the same thing as the Furies and Julia said darkly, 'Don't even go there.'

Looking back it was astonishing how much travelling he had done withJulia, they were always on planes and trains and boats. He'd been hardly anywhere since their break-up, just a few hops across the Channel to his house in the Midi. He had sold the house now, the money should arrive in his account today. He had liked France but it wasn't as if it was home.

Jackson was currently less concerned with the Fates and more concerned by the direction they were travelling in. They were going to Edinburgh? He hadn't caught the train to King's Cross, he had caught the train from King's Cross. The strolling woman had been right. He was going the wrong way.

Satis Hous
e
WHEN REGGIE ARRIVED AT THE BLEAK BUNGALOW IN MUSSELBURGH Ms MacDonald opened the door and said, 'Reggie!' as if she was astonished to see her, although their Wednesday routine was invariable. From being a woman who took pride in the fact that nothing could surprise her, Ms MacDonald had turned into one who was amazed at the simplest things (,Look at that bird!' 'Is that a plane overhead?'). Her left eye was bloodshot as if a red star had exploded in her brain. It made you wonder if it wasn't better just to dive down into the blue and check out early.

No sign of the advent of Christmas in Ms MacDonald's house, Reggie noticed. She wondered if it was against her religion.

'The meal is on the table,' Ms MacDonald said. Every Wednesday they ate tea together and then Ms MacDonald drove across to the other side ofMusselburgh (God help anyone else on the road) to her 'Healing and Prayer' meeting (which, let's face it, wasn't doing much good) while Reggie did homework and kept an eye on Banjo, Ms MacDonald's little old dog. When Ms MacDonald returned, all prayered up and full of the spirit, she went over Reggie's homework over tea and biscuits -'a plain digestive' for Ms MacDonald and a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer bought specially for Reggie.

Reggie didn't know what kind of a cook Ms MacDonald was before her brain started to be nibbled at by her crabby tumour but she was certainly a terrible one now. 'Tea' was usually a stodgy macaroni cheese or a gluey fish pie, after which Ms MacDonald would heave herself up from the table with an effort and say, 'Dessert?' as if she was about to offer chocolate cheesecake or creme bnllee when in fact it was always the same low-fat strawberry yoghurt, which Ms MacDonald watched Reggie eat with a kind of vicarious thrill that was unsettling. Ms MacDonald didn't eat much any more now that she herself was being eaten.

Ms MacDonald was in her fifties but she had never been young. When she was a teacher at the school she looked as ifshe ironed herself every morning and had never betrayed a trace of irrational behaviour (quite the opposite) but now not only had she embraced a crazy religion but she dressed as if she was one step away from being a bag lady and her house was two steps beyond squalid. She was, she said, preparing for the end of the world. Reggie didn't really see how a person could prepare for an event like that and anyway, unless the end of the world happened very soon it seemed unlikely that Ms MacDonald would be around to see it.

Tonight it was oven-baked spaghetti. Ms MacDonald had a recipe that made real spaghetti from a packet taste exactly like tinned, which was quite an achievement.

Over the spaghetti, Ms MacDonald was blethering on about the 'Rapture' and whether it would be before or after the 'Tribulation', or 'the Trib' as she called it with cosy familiarity, as if persecution, suffering and the end of days were going to be on the same level of inconvenience as a traffic jam.

Religion had introduced Ms MacDonald, rather late in the day, to a social life, and her church (aka 'weird religious cult') was keen on pot-luck suppers and uninspiring barbecues. Reggie had been to an agonizing few and eaten cautiously of the burned offerings.

Ms MacDonald belonged to the Church of the Coming Rapture and was herself, she announced smugly, 'rapture-ready'. She was a pretribulationist ('pretribber'), which meant she would be whizzed up to heaven, business-class, while everyone else, including Reggie, had to suffer a great deal of scourging and affliction (,Seventy weeks, actually, Reggie.'). So a lot like everyday life then. There were also post-tribulationists who had to wait until after the scourging but got to bypass heaven and enter the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, 'which is the whole point', Ms MacDonald said. There were also midtribulationists who, as their name implied, went up in the middle of the whole confusing process. Ms MacDonald was saved and Reggie wasn't, that was the bottom line. 'Yes, I'm afraid you're going to hell, Reggie,' Ms MacDonald said, smiling benignly at her. Still, there was one consolation, Ms MacDonald wouldn't be there, nagging her about her Virgil translation.

Whenever some horrible tragedy happened, from the big stuff like planes crashing and bombs exploding, to the smaller stuff like a boy falling offhis bike and drowning in the river or a cot death in the house at the end of the street, they would all be put down to 'God's work' by Ms MacDonald. 'Going about His mysterious business,' she would nod sagely as people ran from disasters on the television news, as if God was running a secretive office dealing in human misery. Only Banjo seemed able to ruille her feelings. 'I hope he goes first,' Ms MacDonald said. It was going to be a race between Ms MacDonald and her gnarled old misfit of a terrier. It was surprising how much soppy, maternal love Ms MacDonald lavished on Banjo, but then Hitler was very fond of his dog. (,Biondi,' Dr Hunter said. 'She was called Biondi.')

Ms MacDonald's dog was on his last legs -literally, sometimes his back legs collapsed under him and he sat in the middle of the floor looking completely bewildered by his sudden immobility. Ms MacDonald had begun to worry that he might die on his own while she was off doing her Wednesday evening healing and praying, so now Reggie stayed with him in case he popped his paws. There were worse ways to spend an evening. Ms MacDonald had a TV that worked, although not the Hunters' extensive cable package sadly, and Reggie got the run of the bookcases and a hot meal for her pains, plus the entire congregation (of eight) always said a prayer for her which wasn't a gift horse she was about to look in the mouth. She might not believe in all that stuff but it was nice to know that someone was thinking about her welfare even if it was Ms MacDonald's flock of loony-tunes who all felt sorry for Reggie on account of her orphan status, which was totally fine by Reggie, the more peopl
e
who felt sorry for her the better, in her opinion. Not Dr Hunter
,
though. She didn't want Dr Hunter to think of her as anything bu
t
heroically, cheeifully competent.

When the yoghurt was ceremoniously finished Ms MacDonal
d
exclaimed, 'Goodness, look at the time!' Nowadays she was cont
inually amazed by the time -'It can't be six o'clock!' or 'Eigh
t
o'clock? It feels more like ten,' and 'It's not really that time is it?'

Reggie could just see her when all that scourging and aillictio
n
started, turning to Reggie in astonishment saying, 'That's never th
e
end of the world!'

Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a tombola) wher
e
God picked out your chosen method of going -'Heart attack fo
r
him, cancer for her, let's see, have we had a terrible car crash yet thi
s
month?' Not that Reggie believed in God, but it was interestin
g
sometimes to imagine. Did God get out of bed one morning an
d
draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a ver
y
domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming poo
l
today, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while.'

The Church of the Coming Rapture was a made-up kind of religion, really it consisted of a bunch of people who believed unbelievable things. They didn't even have a building but held their services in their members' front rooms on a rotational basis. Reggie had never attended one of these services but she imagined it was much like one of their pot-luck suppers with everyone earnestly debating dispensationalist and futurist views while they passed round a plate of fig rolls. The only difference would be that Banjo wouldn't be in attendance, slavering and groaning at the sight of the fig rolls. 'I was never blessed with children of my own,' Ms MacDonald told Reggie once, 'but I have my wee dog. And I have you, ofcourse
,
Reggie,' she added. 'But not for long, Ms Mac,' Reggie said. No, of course, she didn't say that. But it was true. The awful thing was that Ms MacDonald was the nearest thing that Reggie had to a family. Reggie Chase, orphan of the parish, pOor Jenny Wren, Little Reggie, the infant phenomenon.